Review: The Glittering World by Robert Levy

Product Description:
In the tradition of Neil Gaiman (The Ocean at the End of the Lane), Scott Smith (The Ruins), and Jason Mott (The Returned), award-winning playwright Robert Levy spins a dark tale of alienation and belonging, the familiar and the surreal, family secrets and the search for truth in his debut supernatural thriller.

When up-and-coming chef Michael “Blue” Whitley returns with three friends to the remote Canadian community of his birth, it appears to be the perfect getaway from New York. He soon discovers, however, that everything he thought he knew about himself is a carefully orchestrated lie. Though he had no recollection of the event, as a young boy Blue and another child went missing for weeks in the idyllic, mysterious woods of Starling Cove. Soon thereafter, his mother suddenly fled with him to America, their homeland left behind.

But then Blue begins to remember. And once the shocking truth starts bleeding back into his life, his closest friends—Elisa, his former partner in crime; her stalwart husband, Jeremy; and Gabe, Blue’s young and admiring co-worker—must unravel the secrets of Starling Cove and the artists’ colony it once harbored. All four will face their troubled pasts, their most private demons, and a mysterious race of beings that inhabits the land, spoken of by the locals only as the Other Kind…

My Thoughts:
When deciding if I should read and review this book what really caught my attention and made me choose it was that it was compared to Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane  and Scott Smith's The Ruins. Both were books that I loved. The Glittering World is definitely a strange journey with suspenseful moments throughout. 

The story sucked me in at the very beginning and the book narration switching from Blue to each of his friends added even more suspense but about halfway through I felt it lost a little steam. Things just kept getting a weirder and weirder and I was actually more creeped out than hooked on what was coming next. 

The ending was very supernatural and eerie but it actually won me back over. Taking the entire book into consideration I will call this one a win. 

My Recommendation:
I recommend this one for anyone who loves supernatural fantasy books. 

Review: The Glittering World by Robert Levy

https://www.readingwithmonie.com/2015/02/review-glittering-world-by-robert-levy.html

Review: September Sky by John A. Heldt

Product Description:
When unemployed San Francisco reporter Chuck Townsend, 45, and his college dropout son, Justin, take a trip to Mexico in 2016, each hopes to rebuild a relationship after years of estrangement. But their journey takes an unexpected turn when they meet a cruise-ship lecturer who has discovered the secret of time travel. Within days, Chuck and Justin find themselves in 1900, riding a train to Texas, intent on preventing a distant uncle from being hanged for a crime he did not commit. Their quick trip to Galveston, however, becomes long and complicated when they wrangle with business rivals and fall for two beautiful librarians on the eve of a hurricane that will destroy the city. Filled with humor, history, romance, and heartbreak, September Sky follows two directionless souls on the adventure of a lifetime as they try to make their peace with the past, find new purposes, and grapple with the knowledge of things to come.

My Thoughts:
Having read 3 of the 5 books in Heldt's Northwest Passage that also focus around time travel I was looking forward to reading September Sky which is the first book in his new American Journey series. I ended up a little conflicted in my opinion of this one. It's a great story but I felt absolutely no attachments to the characters which was a bit of a disappointment. 

Chuck and his son Justin had no respect for the professor and the rules they agreed to. They immediately went off the reservation and followed about on their own agenda. Right from that moment I found myself a little disconnected and didn't feel invested in much of the story after that. 

I did however like the historical part of the story. I learned a lot about a real tragedy which prompted me to look up information on the actual event. Heldt captured the true horror of it and I was engrossed in that part of the story. This definitely made up for the detachment I had from the characters and I was left wondering about the next installment and who is going to travel next. Based on the author's other books I'm pretty sure I'll be reading book 2 in the series. 

My Recommendation:
I recommend this for anyone who loves time travel romances. 

Review: September Sky by John A. Heldt

https://www.readingwithmonie.com/2015/02/review-september-sky-by-john-heldt.html

Review: The Dead of December by Ryan Bowman

Product Description:

Growing up in the suffocating grip of Detroit's most crime-ridden neighborhood, Sugar Sinclair has always aspired to defy the odds and make something of his life. But on a bitter December night, he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and his hopes for the future are extinguished in the blink of an eye. 

Meanwhile, Gerald Dawes is a weary beat cop weighed down by the disappearance of his son and a crumbling marriage. When a monotonous night shift turns catastrophic and his partner is killed in the line of duty, Gerald reaches an emotional breaking point. Desperate for vengeance, he wrongfully arrests affluent real estate agent Clarence Sanford, whose true crime is one he hopes to keep from his family. 

As Sugar, Gerald and Clarence wage war against their inner demons, their lives become increasingly intertwined, the fateful intersection of their paths increasingly imminent. 
Will truth and justice prevail? Or will the streets of Detroit swallow three more souls? 

My Thoughts:
I think this is the first time I've ever felt like I was reading in slow motion. I could clearly see where everything was leading and I was in tense suspense hoping it wouldn't play out the way I expected. Clearly from the book description things did go wrong and the fall out afterwards leads to gut wrenching decisions that need to be made by all three characters. 

Young Sugar has to make a life decision that has already affected his family and so many in his neighborhood. Clarence is faced with making a confession that will implode his so-called perfect family. Gerald is torn between the politics of the police force and his inner turmoil. They each have nothing but that night weighing heavily on them and have to come to terms with doing the right thing versus doing the easy thing. 

The only reason I didn't give the book a full five star rating was the way the disappearance of Gerald's son was told. I felt like it was only thrown in to explain Gerald's struggles with alcohol. There was no "meat on the bone" in that part of the story and it didn't hold up to the rest of the storyline. Otherwise this was an incredible book that is going on my Top Five list for this year and even though it's only January, I'm confident it will remain there all year.

My Recommendation:
This is the perfect read for anyone who loves crime fiction and page-turning suspense. 

Review: The Dead of December by Ryan Bowman

https://www.readingwithmonie.com/2015/01/review-dead-of-december-by-ryan-bowman.html

Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Product Description: 
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.
 
Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. 
 
Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

My Thoughts:
I learned about Station Eleven in a Facebook post from one of my favorite authors, Marcus Sakey. He posted that he was only 121 pages in and was loving it. He had previously recommended The Martian by Andy Weir which ended up being my favorite read of 2014 (it's also being made into a movie staring Matt Damon, I CAN'T WAIT!) so I promptly downloaded it on Audible and started listening. 

By a couple of chapters in, I was a little skeptical. Station Eleven seemed a little too artsy for my liking. All the talk about the theater and symphony was making me think I wouldn't enjoy the book but I quickly got sucked in and was dying to finish the book. 

The only downside is that all the post-apocalyptic books I've been reading lately are starting to freak me out. They've got me thinking "what if?". It didn't help that during the December 2013 icepocalypse  we had in Dallas I made a run to the grocery store and was shocked by how empty the shelves were. This was only 3 days of ice and there was not a vegetable or loaf of bread to be found in a major grocery store.  Now I'm stockpiling water in my garage and thinking I should start buying bullets by the case. 

But back to the book. The way the story weaves in and out of the different time periods is so very suspenseful. I keep wondering how everything is going to tie together in the end and then suddenly it all makes sense. The characters are exactly as they should be. I despised the not so good guys and adored the heros. I absolutely loved this book. 

My Recommendation:
I highly recommend this for anyone who loves post-apocalyptic survival stories.

Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

https://www.readingwithmonie.com/2015/01/review-station-eleven-by-emily-st-john.html

Review: Mosaic by Deborah Jackson

Product Description:
It wasn’t until Carlos helped me put the pieces back together that I realized how many were missing. 

Shattered. Tormented. Brain on disconnect. 

A car accident leaves Erin Rocheford, a seventeen-year-old hockey player, fractured, disfigured, near death. Not only has her future career in the NHL been erased, but when she’s finally released from the hospital, she can barely walk, her thoughts stumble into each other, and people grimace when they see the scars crisscrossing her face. 

Erin's parents decide that a vacation in Florida, on an island of palm trees and pirate lore, is just what she needs to recover. But in her post-traumatic state, Erin is vulnerable to attack, to a ghostly invasion, and to a further fragmenting of her troubled grey matter. Soon after arriving on the island, a tale of an odd English pirate and his feisty captive—a story of defiance and decapitation—weaves itself into her mind, threatening her very soul. Erin will need to call upon every reserve in her hockey-toned body to keep from falling apart altogether, to fight back, and to protect her star player—the one boy who can see beyond the scars.

My Thoughts:
I knew that Mosaic wasn't going to be a suspense novel like the two other Jackson books I've read, Ice Tomb and Sinkhole but I wasn't disappointed. Mosaic is geared towards older teens and hits the mark unlike some YA reads that tend to shock me with the amount of sex and drugs in the story. It has just the right amount of sexual tension and relationship drama to give the book a realistic teenage feel.

The story itself is pretty interesting. Pirates, serial killers and ghosts all lend themselves to a twisting tale. Throw in a troubled teen getting over an accident, a spoiled rich girl pouting over the bad boy who dumped her, a suspicious cop who lost a daughter and an over-protective dad and you have a winner that stands above most YA books I've read. 

My Recommendation:
I recommend Mosaic for anyone who loves YA suspense. 

Review: Mosaic by Deborah Jackson

https://www.readingwithmonie.com/2015/01/mosaic-by-deborah-jackson.html